Warfare

The smoke billowed in the distance, choking the sunlight in the sky above us. As I stood in front of my army, I knew their spirits were broken. They held their rocket launchers, their link guns, their AVRiL anti-vehicle weapons, and their beam rifles low in their arms, swooning with the labor pains of acquiescence. Arranged around me in a horse shoe, each of them wore a heaviness on their shoulders I had scarcely imagined before. I knew each of these soldiers by name: Jester, Bishop…uh, that other guy…okay I knew some of them by name. The point is, I’d waged many a battle with these metal-clad marines, and I knew when they were about to give up.

We had a simple objective: take possession of several power “nodes” and hold them, creating a flow of energy across the battlefield that would connect us to our enemy’s power core and allow us to destroy it. At the same time, of course, we had to prevent our foe, the scurvy dogs of “Blue Team,” from rendering the same fate upon our beloved “Red” core. After a strong start, we had lost every single power node to Blue, and our precious core was slowly dying in our arms. Their armies were an unstoppable wave of tanks, jets, and hovercraft generated by the extra power their node dominance afforded them. Their will seemed undeniable. They were closing in.

That’s the moment I gave the talk. A Saint Crispin’s Day Speech, if you will. Only I didn’t talk any flowery nonsense about “we happy few, we band of brothers.” I looked my team dead in the eye and told it like it was…or rather, I told it to my television screen, standing mightily in front of the couch in my boxers, and I did so very quietly, because Corelyn was sleeping in the next room:

“Soldiers,” I began, “Patriots. Friends. Today I can honestly say, without reservation, that I am ashamed to be your commander. You’re a bunch of tambourine-shaking hippie cowards. Last time I checked, pressing the X button orders you maggots to ‘hold this position.’ But maybe I didn’t check the game manual thoroughly enough, because apparently the orders you received were ‘Sit there like a bunch of tools.’ God help me, you look like Army Reserve rejects out there, begging for mercy every time those Blue mongrels summon up a tank. You’ve got rocket launchers, for crying out loud! Shoot the damned things, blow something up!

And here’s another thing: I want an explanation for why I die faster when I tell you boneheads to “cover me.” Explain it. Now. Shut up, I don’t want to hear it! When I order covering fire, I sure as hell better be able to stroll happily to the enemy power core on a magical path of Blue corpses!

Now, I’m going to go single-handedly take back our Power Nodes. Again. Then I’m going to order you to ‘Hold. This. Position.’ That is an order, not the Second Amendment, so obey it blindly. You’re going to live at that Power Node. It will be your home. During the day you’ll think about the enemy Power Core exploding, and at night you’ll dream of Nodes, and how protecting them is your soul’s delight. You’ll wonder sometimes what the outside world is like, but only for a moment, because all you can remember is how you’re never ever leaving this spot ever. You’re going to sit there and kill things that move. You can kill me if I walk by and happen to look “blue” to you because you’ve gone so insane just standing there guarding that Power Node. After we’ve won the game, because you did your job finally, and I come to tell you that it’s all right for you to stop guarding the Power Node, you’re still not allowed to move. If I tell you, ‘This isn’t a test, you really are done,’ stay there anyway. Just stay. When you’ve starved to death, then you can leave the Power Node.

This is zero-hour, people. I’m not going to shoot sunshine up your nose, we’re in a bad place here. Blue Team wants to stomp all over our genitals and I can’t imagine what’s going to stop them unless we cowboy-the-heck-up right about now. Now you all are, as I said, embarrassing failures, and I would like nothing more than to join Blue Team and abandon you forever, but this game does not allow that, so I’m stuck with you. But I swear on the graves of every goldfish I’ve ever owned that if you don’t grow a pair and start making some widows out there on that field of battle, I’m going to press ‘Start,’ go to ‘Options,’ turn ‘Friendly Fire’ to ‘On,’ and execute every one of you.

Does everyone understand? Excellent. Go Read Team.”

And that’s when the magic happened. Like all of those great sports movies you’ve seen, or like the end of Henry V, Red Team came together. We played off of one another, we fought vigorously, we darted and weaved. We took one node, then another, then all of them, and then we took the Blue Power Core to town and just barely did more damage to it than Blue did to ours as the “overtime” clock ticked down to nothing.

We won. I sat on the couch, weeping for joy and thrusting my fists in the air…again really quietly. We had done it. The speech had worked.

….

…Of course, every single soldier on the battlefield other than I was run by an artificial intelligence program. And true, I had no microphone connected, and even if I did, none of these AI bots were programmed with even the most rudimentary voice recognition.

Still! If these computer-generated warriors have souls, somewhere out there in the nether region of digital code, then I touched those binary souls of theirs.

Or I remembered that the X button reloads. The D-Pad is actually the one that sends orders. Whoops.